My mood of
late against meditation and post-1960s American spirituality: I'm sick and
tired of it, I hate it, and I'm not going to take it anymore.This nonsense and claptrap has gone on for
entirely too long.If spiritual people
are offended by this pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, then too
damn bad for them and their feelings.It is necessary to sacrifice false spirituality in order to gain a firm
grip on the straight facts.

On the
whole, to concede the legitimacy of someone's drug-free meaningful spirituality
that gives meaning to their lives is, in practice, to condone lies and falsity
and to encourage suppression of Truth together with suppression of
entheogens.The fact is, entheogens are
the source, fountainhead, wellspring and so on of all that is highest and most
profound and most central in religion; *real* Christianity and *real* Buddhism
and *real* esotericism are, *first and foremost*, entheogenic.

The
legitimacy of drug-free spirituality is *nothing* in comparison to that of real
spirituality, which is practically identical with entheogens.I grant a millionth of a percent legitimacy
and efficacy to the upstart proposed alternative methods which, the bottom line
is, *don't work*.Drug-free
spirituality is a failure.Any
exceptions are nothing, because they just prove the rule, offering only a
travesty of religion, an insult to the genuine, actual, authentic *intense*
religion.There is far more than enough
support to back up my adamant hardline view.

Enough
lies -- won't someone, for once, tell it like it is?I wash my hands of these lies; I want nothing to do with
them.There is one true path:
entheogens.The other proposed paths
are cheap ripoffs that are nothing in comparison: to admit as I have done that
meditation is a tenth of a percent as effective as entheogens is to tell evil
lies.Here I state the truth, that
meditation is a millionth of a millionth as effective as entheogens, which is
to say, meditation is extremely ineffective, while entheogens are extremely
effective.

Put side
by side, the bottom line is, meditation/contemplation is a failure, while
entheogens are a success.The received
dominant framework is the assumption that direct religious experiencing is rare
and not entheogenic -- we must yell in the streets that that is the very
opposite of the truth; direct religious experiencing is potentially utterly
common, and is entheogenic: the received framework is bunk, wrong, mistaken,
false, and wholly and profoundly off-base.

There is
no mystery about the mysteries, esotericism, and gnosis: to the extent that the
mysteries, gnosis, and esotericism actually delivered on their promise of
direct religious experiencing, to that exact extent, the mysteries, gnosis, and
esotericismwere entheogen-based.The one or two supposed exceptions only
prove the rule: meditation/contemplation is entirely a mistake, a lie, futile,
hopeless, a false replacement, a phony substitute that debases religious
experiencing, and has to be discarded and rejected as a hypothesis about the
nature of religious experiencing.

Neither I
nor my audience has another minute to waste conceding legitimacy to the
illegitimate, condoning confusion and error.It is a tiny slight mistake to wholly dismiss drug-free spirituality as
I do, whereas it is a colossal error and lie of the first order to grant
drug-free meditation/contemplation a significant amount of legitimacy.

Drug-free
meditation/contemplation definitely does *not* have a significant amount of
legitimacy; its legitimacy is vanishingly small next to the towering efficacy
of entheogens.Drug-free
meditation/contemplation has no more than an incidental, curiosity degree of
efficacy or legitimacy.

The
received view, which treats drug-free meditation/contemplation as favorably as
possible, while diminishing entheogens as much as possible, is evil in that in
practice, its main effect is to block and impede and prevent actual direct
religious experience, substituting a placebo instead.

Every time
anyone says "nature", "garden", or "natural", the
first thing you should picture is an Amanita mushroom, surrounded then by
cannabis, opium, morning glories, datura, nightshade, henbane, thornapple, and
cowpie mushrooms.From the Garden of
Eden to Paradise of the Kingdom of Heaven, what makes a sacred garden sacred is
its central purpose, entheogenic plants -- psychoactive drugs.

In the
modern period, artificial drug-free mysticism (meditation/contemplation) has
enjoyed highly favorable conditions, and yet it has been proven to be almost
completely ineffective and un-ergonomic at inducing any specific result, which
is why everyone considers enlightenment to be so rare and difficult -- because
they begin with the assumption that enlightenment must be a matter of drug-free
mysticism, but drug-free mysticism basically doesn't work; it only mimics to
some extent the full-on entheogen-triggered intense mystic altered state.

Meanwhile,
the natural, entheogen method of triggering the mystic phenomena has been
violently and systematically suppressed during the entire broad modern period,
yet shows tremendous potential and normally brings about the full gamut of ego
death and related experiences, and shows every potential of bringing about full
enlightenment, of a specifically definable sort (as I have explicitly written
about in postings and in my Intro webpage), to the normal, average person.

It is
completely and extremely unfair to compare the achievements of artificial
drug-free mysticism with natural entheogen-induced mysticism during the modern
period that gives many benefits to the drug-free approach, and puts every
impediment before the mystic garden approach.Grow a plant, go to jail, so how can we even begin to compare the
achievements of the two attempted methods of enlightenment?

Drug-free
mysticism fills the magazines with false and empty promises and claims that are
never going to be realized in the normal, average person; to sustain these
books of lies they have had to ever lower and lower their promises.No American Buddhism magazine now is so
foolish as to claim that their methods produce an altered state of
consciousness -- instead, they vaguely promise some undefinable and
unaccountable spiritual uplift of daily life.

Drug-free
mysticism is a recent fantastic construct that is parasitical upon
entheogen-based actual religious experiencing.People report that entheogens commonly produce intense religious
experiences, and people report that meditation usually does not produce intense
religious experiences.These reports of
the failure and poor prospects of meditation and the success and tremendous
prospects of entheogens are clear and unambiguous even though drug-free
meditation has been given every break while every obstacle has been placed in
the way of entheogens.

Even
though drug-free meditation has been given a big unfair head start, and though
people sabotage and trip up the entheogen method, entheogens are *still*
winning the race so much that the entheogen diminishers have been forced to
deny that religious experiencing or spiritual enlightenment has anything to do
with an intense altered state.These
entheogen diminishers have had to redefine spirituality as a mere uplifting of
normal daily life.

Few indeed
are the spiritualists who claim that drug-free meditation is reliable and
effective at producing an intense mystic altered state in the average, normal
person -- it is a claim that not only lacks evidence, but rather, has all
evidence clearly working against it.Like the phony drug war, the claim of the drug-free
meditation/contemplation advocates cannot stand up to a genuine debate and
critical investigation, but must retreat into vague claims and unaccountable
conceptions of spirituality, recent trendy innovations which lack historical
evidence and reproducible evidence.

When 99%
of people 99% of the time fail to obtain any sort of religious state of
consciousness from drug-free meditation, the excuse of the entheogen
diminishers is "you're not doing it right".Entheogen-favoring spiritualists don't have to bother inventing
such excuses, because the entheogen method actually delivers on its promises,
producing if anything, an overwhelming excess of the religious state of
consciousness.

There is
no contest when comparing the degree of reliability and intensity of entheogen
versus drug-free spirituality methods for the average, normal, ordinary,
typical person: entheogens are vastly more reliable, effective, ergonomic,
intense, and efficient.

People who
claim that meditation is effective, reliable, and repeatable have a low, small
conception of what religious experiencing and spirituality can be, or they have
an abnormal brain constitution that's irrelevant to almost everyone, or they
claim that their guru or some rumored remote sage has succeeded, even though no
one else is having any luck with the "ideal" drug-free approach.

Drawing a
distribution curve for the efficacy and reliability of drug-free versus
entheogenic methods, and comparing the curves, the drug-free method can only be
characterized as pathetic, a blip that just registers enough to prove that the
best method of preventing and avoiding spiritual experiencing and mystic
enlightenment is by drug-free meditation/contemplation.

Do you
want to have nothing to do with religious experiencing and intense mystic
enlightenment?Then I wholeheartedly
recommend drug-free enlightenment, which has been firmly proven, after
countless many attempts, to almost never produce religious experiencing and
intense mystic enlightenment.

The good
news is, there is a method that is highly reliable and ergonomic: combining
visionary plants with intellectual study.The method of combining visionary plants with intellectual study doesn't
magically improve daily life or the socio-political world; it brings what is
first of all claimed: intense mystic experiencing and metaphysical
enlightenment about the nature and relationship of self, time, space, control,
and world.

Dick
wrote:

>I
have been studying mystical experiences (including gnosis and much other) for
near on fifty years,

During the
modern era, which is the most spiritually illiterate and dark era ever, fifty
years of research is 50 years of inventorying faint and mediocre religious
experiences.

Belief in
the potency of drug-free religious experiencing often fits with belief in
psychic phenomena.I definitely
dismiss, in principle, psychic phenomena, because such phenomena would
complicate my model of enlightenment.

I do
acknowledge that there are many reports of drug-free, including spontaneous,
mystical experiences.I have never
denied this and will never flatly deny this.Rather, turning the tables against the entheogen-diminishers, I diminish
and criticize drug-free and spontaneous mystical experiences as being incidental
and mere curiosities, minor accidents and random quirks that are the mind's
entheogen-ready circuits leaking a bit of noise.

Drug-free
mystical experiences are rare and weak and not repeatable on demand; they are
on the whole basically irrelevant, of relatively little import next to the
towering efficicacy, intensity, reliability, and repeatability of entheogens as
a trigger.

>>None
of these documented experience were brought about by drugs; they were quite
natural and spontaneous. How do I know? Easy, from hindsight of experience one
can know that they are not shooting the sh*t.

Rather,
the fact that one can have a drug-free mystic experience proves that the
reports might or might not have involved drugs.I can relate to your sureness by recalling that I know for a fact
that Rush is an acid-based Rock group, even though, on some people's
interpretation, I have no certain proof.

>However,
if people wish to take drugs then that is their business (and societies problem
- for we all familiar with the effects of over-doing it).

That
parenthetical assertion and its surrounding worldview with a raft of implicit
meta-assertions is highly debatable.

>I am
very opposed to messing with the mind

That
characterization of psychoactive drug use is highly debatable. For example, the drugs work because they are
like well-fitting chemical keys, in contrast to how alcohol works in
nonspecific shotgun fashion as far as specific receptors are concerned.If I recall, this point is covered in Ott's
book The Natural Paradises.

>The
point being is that after forty years of communication with folk I have never
yet read of a drug induced experience which comes anywhere near matching a
spontaneous transcendent mystical experience, and that is a fact.

That
judgement is unbelievable and incredible, because it contradicts (without
putting forth justifying evidence) what many entheogen researchers have
reported and concluded: that many drug-induced experiences closely match
spontaneous mystical experiences.Who
are we to believe, and on what basis: the researchers who judge that the drug
and nondrug experiences are fully indistinguishable, or those who judge that
the non-drug mystical experiences are nowhere near matched by drug-induced
mystical experiences?

The
content of mystic experiencing is the same type and character, whether
triggered by drugs or not.There is
plenty of evidence (reports and writings) to support this.I have little respect for these writings as
they are usually gathered, however, because we are then usually merely
comparing first-time entheogen users with one-time spontaneous mystics, or
meditators highly invested in many years of meditation.We need broader distribution curves, culled
in an environment less biased against psychoactive drugs.

Entheogens
are more reliable and available on demand than drug-free methods, and are
generally far more intense.

>If the
research were to have found

>otherwise
then I would state it as so; but it is not.

Other
researchers have stated it as so.Who
are we to believe, and on what basis?There are two opposed camps of researchers or people making claims.How do we choose between the two worldviews
and sets of assertions and interpretations?

>True,
from what one hears and reads, then it becomes clear that drugs can at times
open the doors to the mind at various levels - but not very deep.

That's a
completely debatable judgement that relies on a certain interpretive
framework.Most published reports are
by the dregs of society; if people weren't thrown in jail with careers
deliberately wrecked by the prohibition-for-profit bandwagon, we would have
more fine writers and thinkers opening the doors at fully deep levels.Today's system of prohibition produces a
filtering effect that gives the impression of drugs being limited to ignorant
high school kids.

>On the
other hand however there is the negative side - and this is not found or
documented with spontaneous experiences.

That's
entirely debatable.The claimed
negative effects of drugs, including degree and scope, is supported by a huge
amount of evil, harmful, destructive, profit-driven propaganda:
prohibition-for-profit.Psychoactive
drugs should be decriminalized; prohibition of psychoactive drugs and
suppression of those who use them should be illegal.

Drug-free
mystical experiences are generally harmless because they are rare and feeble in
effect.Efficacy and potential harm are
correlated.Guns that merely squirt
water are less harmful than real guns that shoot bullets.Drug-free spirituality is a harmless water
gun and doesn't stand to threaten the egoic delusion of personal free will and
separate self.

Psychotomimetic
drugs are a real threat to the egoic psyche, a direct threat and detonator
shaped precisely to threaten the heart and foundation of egoic delusion: the
mental worldmodel that is founded on the assumption of freewill control power
and separate-self.

Because
drug-free mystical experiences don't come with much intensity or frequency;
they are rare and generally feeble.Entheogens are the only ergonomic choice for pragmatics.

>when
the individual is, for

>some
reason, ready to cope with them

That
cliched expression is an excuse for the rareness of mystic experiences and the
inefficacy of drug-free meditation: "The method works, but you weren't
ready yet."

>and
integrate them within their own process of becoming the more that we are?

>...
evidence suggests that anyone having a spontaneous 'wham bang' experience
(which blows their mind) will come to handle it - it may take a few years
however. But there are many documented reports of people who have induced an
experience which they were not ready for and have later committed suicide by
virtue of failure to integrate what they have found. And this of course is
tragic.

Were there
many?What proportion?What were the actual causes?The above stock assertions won't fly without
essentially sound support, though they are always trotted out as unquestionable
facts of the universe in what passes for "debate" about drug-induced
mysticism.Somewhere there must be
entire nations filled with these masses of acid casualities, upon whom the old
familiar entheogen-diminishing song and dance so heavily relies, even though
other research reports the lack of any statistical correlation between abnormal
psychology and entheogen use.

The one
thing we can be certain of at this point is that we have forbidden research
before it even had a chance to begin.

>... I
am in full agreement - the advent of Rome pushed Western civilisation back into
the dark ages for two thousand years.

Lately I
have speculated with Edwin Johnson's book "The Pauline Epistles Re-studied
and Explained" that the years of the dark ages didn't exist; the
Reformation (1517) happened only a few centuries after the fall of Rome (476),
and that Christianity, particularly scripture-based official Christianity, is a
recent invention and that Christianity is completely centered and based in the
brief Middle Ages or so-called "Renaissance" (re-birth of antiquity
culture after its absense) rather than coming from around the year 180 or 50
CE.

The advent
of Roman Catholocism "pushed Western civilization back into the dark ages
for two thousand years" in that the Catholic church was invented around
1525 and invented stories about its having begun 1,500 years ago, inserting
many nonexistent centuries in between and then excusing the total lack of
evidence for those centuries by condemning them as utterly dark centuries in
which next to nothing happened, and dismissing the total lack of evidence for
pre-476 Christianity with various flimsy excuses: "they worshipped in
secret", "they were ashamed of the cross so never portrayed it".

>If it
were not for Rome (and state Priestcraft) we would not only have been on the
moon a thousand years sooner

I don't
know how science was spurred or hindered by institutional religion -- books are
available trying to determine this relationship.

>but
people would have a proper understanding of the metaphysical aspects of their
emanation of BEING.

That
happened commonly until the Protestant/Modern/Scientific era, per Nasr's book
Knowledge and the Sacred, and some other theorists of Tradition.I don't know why esoteric knowledge
relatively withered at that time.I
suppose that people got farther from nature's psychoactive plants, such as
cowpie mushrooms, and therefore became literally exiled from the mystic garden
of Eden.

>... he
claims that 90% of the stuff called 'Gnosticism' is utter junk ... 99% of it
is.

>KNOW
THY SELF - both the transcendent and imminent bits.

>1.
Given that consciousness exists then what exists for consciousness to become
conscious of?

>2.
What is the real Self when everything which is not the real essential Self is
extracted from our system of dynamics?

>By the
way, the process of things which are not YOU being stripped away from the
system of our incarnate dynamics is called PURGATION - and this is a
spontaneous process, NOT self induced.

It's
definitionally arbitrary.In some sense
purgation of egoic delusion is self-induced, a product of the personal will, an
act of mystic suicide.In some sense,
the psyche is lifted, is rescued, is acted upon and transformed from beyond the
personal will.

>Eventually
at the end of this process there is an annihilation of self existence (quite
scary at the time).

Loss of
control, loss of freewill, during the psychotomimetic loose-cog state -- the
mind that is too logical to be afraid ought to be most afraid, being now ready to
be crucified and to crucify one's lower self, in full defeat and full
glory.Enlightenment is deadly bad news
for egoic controllership, an apocalyptic destruction of the old, through full
instability, to a new world which will stably stand forever.

>After
a duration of non existence (the cessation of the flow of consciousness) there
is a resurrection of our being. But that resurrection is back into the eternal
mode of our cognitive being - the innate and essential primordial condition of
cognitive being. And it IS SO. Ipso Facto. Keep in mind also the FACT that you
cannot know the absolute nature of objectivity until such time that you first
come to discover the absolute nature of your Self - the observer of the
observed. Creation is ONE thing; but it is constructed in the mode of a duality
- the observer and the observed. The phenomenon of consciousness works this
way. Hence, the only way to find out what we really are is by going home to
where we have our ground of being - in the cognitive aspect of the life force.

>>I
think what could loosely be called the "New Age" movement is a
heartfelt surge of a wish to get "there" - whether by drugs, dancing,
meditating, not meditating (nondual stuff), etc., etc.

New Age
wants to retain freewill while embracing no-separate-self.That is a self-contradiction that must be
abandoned in order to stop reincarnation and consciously enter the kingdom of
heaven.

No-free-will
is essentially locked into no-separate-self; enlightenment is the intellectual
and experiential knowledge of no-free-will/no-separate-self; such knowing is
consciously experienced as entrapment and imprisonment, and the subsequent
feeling of release from that sense of entrapment is allegorized as gaining true
spiritual freedom.

One can
escape that entrapment by high magical thinking, divine transcendent thinking
that rejects naive animalistic freewill delusion, and that is prepared to
mysteriously step outside the deterministic cosmos when the chips are down and
survival of viable mental integrity is at stake.

New Age
spirituality was largely awakened by pot and acid, and now they try to invent a
false history of religion which supposes that non-drug meditation and
contemplation is the historical wellspring and fountainhead of religious
experiencing and enlightenment.But
meditation was developed as a technique first discovered as a drug state and
then formalized to augment the drug state.

Today's
meditation has been ripped off and torn out of its historical context, in
conjunction with disparaging, diminishing, and belittling visionary plants,
even though such plants are the source of meditation and the source of religion
including Hellenistic religion-philosophy, Christianity, and Buddhism.

>>IOW,
what's happening now is like what was happening back in the early
"Christian" times.

I am Mary
Magdalene, the first apostle of the modern systematic-thinking era to see and
explain clearly and ergnomically that the sema/soma is empty, that ingesting
the transcendent god's flesh is by far the most ergonomic trigger for revealing
the secret rulership of vertical block-universe determinism and ascending out
from that frozen rock universe.

>>IOW,
we're finally picking up where we left off before we were so rudely interrupted
by a politicised, literalist Christianity.

I wonder
if that Christianity was actually a modern invention between the age of the
printing press and the Enlightenment.My ability to read the language that is more classic than latin and
greek -- the mythic-mystic altered-state metaphor language -- suggests that in
the classic pre-Enlightenment era, Christianity was generally
mystic-allegorical, not political and literalist.

I just
picked up Shaman's Drum issue 60, 2001.It's a special issue on psychedelics -- just the fact of the magazine
focusing on it is reason enough to collect it, like the special psychedelics
issues of Tricycle (Buddhism magazine) and Gnosis (esoteric Christianity
magazine) and High Times.

My general proposal is that in general, all these
hand-wringing queries about searching for spirituality should quit beating
around the bush and turn their attention toward where it is already constantly
being pulled anyway.What more clear
"sign from God" are they looking for, than the reappearance of
entheogens again and again throughout pop spirituality?They keep acting like it's uncear, yet
nothing could be more obvious.So all
these serious, in-depth searches are just so much smoke and noise based on
pretending that the answer or key is difficult and unknown.

At some point it is obstinate irrationality to keep looking
when you've already found the solution to a search and puzzle.Entheogens fit as the solution to the
mysterious puzzle.It's like someone
reading the stack of books about No-Historical-Jesus and then still coming back
with that same old, in-denial canard, "But this is all speculation and we
can never know for sure."

Past a point, the claim to not know become obstinate
irrationality, because rationality was never based on knowing anything
absolutely for sure; we can be relatively sure and confident about all things
we know, though *none* of them are known "absolutely for sure".

In the case of this seminar, the rational thing to do would
be to focus heavily on entheogens, a focus which is clearly warranted.But more likely, the seminar will try to
play the old card of putting it both ways: entheogens are extremely
interesting, but entheogens are not to get more than a bit of emphasis -- one
book that is relatively innocent of this mistake, however, is the book Rational
Mysticism, which gives entheogens the fully central place they clearly deserve.

The first paragraph in the seminar announcement lists the
following:

Alan Watts

Aldous Huxley

Starhawk

Carlos Castaneda

mystical nature poet Robinson Jeffers (?)

mystical nature poet Gary Snyder (?)

Jim Jones

Heaven's Gate

Church of Satan

Church of Scientology

The first Zen monastery and first Hindu temple in the
western hemisphere

UFO cults

Esalen

The Grateful Dead

Burning Man

soul surfers (?)

Sierra club

The following, at least, are related to entheogens:

Alan Watts

Aldous Huxley

Carlos Castaneda

Church of Satan

Esalen

The Grateful Dead

Burning Man

That's at least 7 out of 17 forms of "alternative
spirituality" that are related to entheogens -- making entheogens by far
the leading so-called "eccentric alternative spirituality".

>>the idea that California's alternative spirituality
stands as a distinct religious tradition on its own

>>sects, cultures, and spiritual techniques

>>our core predicament: how to rediscover spirituality
in a modern world defined by technology, consumer culture, and a scientific
cosmology

>>California's maverick tradition of spiritual
innovation.

>>an overview of California spirituality

>>reasons why this peculiar sensibility set down roots
here on the west coast

>>the "California Tao": nature, the body, and
the evolution of consciousness ... is inseparable from California's unique
technological experience.California
... has led the way towards a postmodern culture of media, subcultures,
computer technology, aero-space, and rootless consumerism. Its alternative
spiritual movements both mirror this process and attempt to compensate for its
considerable problems.

>>He has given lectures at conferences all over the
world on topics ranging from psychedelic culture to cyberspace to postmodern
spirituality

____________

-----Original Message-----

From: Erik Davis [mailto:erik~at~techgnosis.com]

Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 1:00 PM

To: erik~at~techgnosis.com

Subject: [Erik Davis] Upcoming Bay Area seminar

People living in the Bay Area might be interested in the
following seminar that I will be leading at the California Institute of
Integral Studies in San Francisco later this winter.It is the first time I will be publicly presenting some of the
strange and marvelous fruits of my research into the history of alternative
spirituality in California, and I'm very excited about it.

Please contact me with any questions you might have.

Erik

"The Altered State: California's Spiritual
Frontiers"

a four-week seminar by Erik Davis

Tuesday nights 7 to 9:30 pm

Feb 17, 24 March 2, March 16.

California Institute of Integral Studies

695 Minna Street

San Francisco

Alongside its body obsessions and media dreams, California
is perhaps best known for its spiritual eccentricity. For well over a century,
the state has been host to a dizzying number of exotic religions, ad-hoc cults,
and all manner of mind-and-body-altering fads and fantasies. California has
been home to spiritual mavericks like Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley, to popular
visionaries like Starhawk and Carlos Castaneda, to mystical nature poets like
Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder, and to living nightmares like Jim Jones and
Heaven's Gate. It cradles the Church of Satan and the Church of Scientology;
looking east, it built the first Zen monastery and first Hindu temple in the
western hemisphere. California is responsible for UFO cults and Esalen, for the
Grateful Dead and Burning Man, for soul surfers and the Sierra club. If
consciousness is truly evolving, than California has served as its American
Petri dish.

This four-week seminar, which will include slideshows, film
clips, and music, is devoted to the idea that California's alternative
spirituality stands asa distinct
religious tradition on its own-a kind of improvised and hedonistic Hinduism,
full of contradictory sects, cultures, and spiritual techniques, but all
speaking to our core predicament: how to rediscover spirituality in a modern
world defined by technology, consumer culture, and a scientific cosmology. In
the class, we will encounter unknown ancestors, sacred spots, and secret
histories buried in the cultural landscape. Such discoveries may provide a
regional sense of "rootless roots" at a time when so many of us are
feeling unmoored. Indeed, many of our contemporary concerns with deep ecology,
human transformation, body-positive spirituality, and the techno-science of
mind are rooted in California's maverick tradition of spiritual innovation.

The first class will provide an overview of California
spirituality, and suggest some reasons why this peculiar sensibility set down
roots here on the west coast. The remaining three classes will focus on major
dimensions of the "California Tao": nature, the body, and the
evolution of consciousness-a notion that, I will argue, is inseparable from
California's unique technological experience.California, after all, has led the way towards a postmodern culture of
media, subcultures, computer technology, aero-space, and rootless consumerism.
Its alternative spiritual movements both mirror this process and attempt to
compensate for its considerable problems. By understanding these dynamics, we
can better approach the transformations and disruptions that lay ahead for all
of us.

About the lecturer: Erik Davis wrote the cult classic
Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, which has
been translated into five languages. He has given lectures at conferences all
over the world on topics ranging from psychedelic culture to cyberspace to
postmodern spirituality, including programs at Stanford, Swarthmore, Esalen,
and London's ICA. He has given workshops on the I Ching and Technological
Future. He is currently collaborating with Michael Rauner on a photo essay book
about the history of California spirituality.

For non-CIIIS students, the fee for the four-week program is
$225 per person. Folks may

register online at www.ciis.edu/lifelong, or call
415-575-6175.People may also
pre-register up to the day before the first class meeting, or if space
available, at the door.

It is so obvious surveying the Gnosis magazine issues --
visionary plants keep reappearing regularly throughout articles and reviews,
yet the special issue on psychedelics works to diminish and restrain and
restrict the perpetual historical credit that plants deserve.It is child's play to spot entheogen
references throughout the articles.

Those on the outside, not recognizing the interpretive keys
they've been holding the whole time like Dorothy's shoes in Wizard of Oz, talk
about "mystic gardens", "fasting" followed by
"wine", and suchlike with zero conscious recognition of visionary
plants that serve as tree-ladders into the heavens.

_________________

Perennial philosophy is simply the observation that we're
made of color.

This is not an occult science. This is not one of those
crazy systems of divination and astrology. That stuff is hooey and you've got
to have a screw loose to go in for that. Humankind is simply materialized color
operating on the 49th vibration. You'd make that conclusion walking down the
street or going to the store.

http://watch.pair.com/HRinitiation.html
-- "the centuries-old rabbinic ban on the dissemination of kabbalistic
practices among those under forty and unschooled in Bible and Talmud ...
Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, were traditionally not even taught to people
until the age of 40, when they had completed their education in Torah and
Talmud ...

the age
restriction was not widespread, but put forward by the Ashkenazic Jews.
Sephardic Jews did not hold to this thinking. ... This prohibition has come
from Ashkenazic (East European) Jews and has never applied to Sepharidic
(Middle Eastern) Jews. The historical basis for the 'rule' comes from opponents
of Kabbalah within Judaism who (successfully) attempted to restrict its study.
At the root of this was the heresy of false messiah Shabbatai Tzevi (17th. C)
which resulted in large numbers of Jews leaving the orthodox fold"

The
genuine, entheogenic version of a religion causes people to leave the
Literalist fold, so such use is suppressed by the Literalist, institutionalized
religion by being postponed out of existence.

Entheogens
are the *main*, not the only, way of triggering the religious state of
cognition.How can we suppress genuine
religious experiencing?

oDenigrate entheogens.Slightly advocate them but then heap great
abuse on them, and claim you've advocated them.

oPromote less effective, ergonomic, reliable
triggers.

oPostpone study of the esoteric form of a
religion.

oDenigrate rationality; seek to eliminate and
disrespect it.

oPortray enlightenment as inherently
requiring decades to attain.

oDeny and suppress how widely entheogenic
enlightenment has been used.

oWrite histories of religion that portray
placebo religion as being fully dominant and that portray entheogen use as a
rare deviation or recent corruption (Mircea Eliade)

I now
consider entheogenic esoteric religion to be primary, main, and dominant, and
am less inclined to conceive of "mainstream, official, dominant, orthodox,
Literalist" religion as being widespread.I'm "forgetting what we think we know".Literalism?Non-entheogenic religion?I've
never heard of such a thing.

As far as
I know, most Christians celebrate the Last Supper in house churches with mixed
wine.Most Buddhists place entheogens
at the center of their religious practice.Typical monks in all religions use entheogens.

Literalism
no longer makes any sense; I can no longer think of religion that way.Entheogen esoteric religion looms so large
in my thinking, I never give a thought to mere Literalism with placebo
sacraments and with monkish meditation that isn't augmented by traditional
entheogens.When you say
"traditional religion", I now think "esoteric entheogenic
experiential religion".

Freke
& Gandy have a useful usage, of "Gnostic" world religion vs.
"Literalist" world religion.The latter is religion as conceived of by those who are too ignorant to
know anything about religion; they don't count and aren't registered on my
radar.They are, as a rule, wholly ignorant
of the very existence of multiple versions of each religion and the presence of
a mystic version of each religion.

In the
field of religion, such religionists or empty-headed "secular
humanists" who have nothing but loathing of religion, and madly demonize
Christianity as all-bad, are of no more import than some ten-year-old posting
on the Internet.Non-entheogenic,
Literalist religion may or may not have the larger number of adherents (now or
in the past), but entheogenic esoteric religion is where *all* the action and
substance is at.

I'm
particularly against the thinking of a man who spent his life in Catholic
school and seminary, and has recently awakened to become dogmatically against
Christianity altogether.Those who
don't see the profound potential in Christianity are blind to mystic myth.I'm not advocating any sort of practice, but
rather, comprehension and recognition of what the religious frameworks are
really, ultimately about.

Dogmatically
believing Literalist religion, and then turning around and dogmatically hating
Literalist religion, or Christianity in particular, can't possibly be a
concluding, resting point -- it remains, in character, Literalist, just as
conventional "secular humanism" in its rejection of Christianity and
religion remains Literalist and clueless in character, remaining ignorant of
transcendent knowledge.

There are
two mortal, unforgiveable sins, or crimes against the Holy Spirit: Literalist
religion and atheism (considering all religion beyond mundane ethics to be
empty bunk).Transcendent knowledge is
substantial, profound, and true -- or worthwhile -- but neither of the false
alternatives, Literalism and atheism (anti-religion), can possibly lead to the
real goal of mental development, which is the philosophy-religion of
Transcendent Knowledge, for which the main gate is entheogens.